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Missed the first part of the interview? You can find it here 
Coldbird and Virtuous Flame are the talented devs behind CFW Pro, a (Light) Custom Firmware that is progressively becoming the most mainstream CFW solution for most PSP Owners. I had the privilege to discuss with them about their ongoing work a few days ago, here is the second part of this interview.
Unless you’ve been living under a Nintendo rock for the past 6 months, you already know these two hackers who have been relentlessly working on a Homebrew Enabler / Custom Firmware for the latest PSP models, including the PSP Go. Known as CFW Pro, this tool is progressively becoming the most used Custom Firmware solution on all PSPs.
Today I had the privilege to discuss with both Coldbird and Virtuous Flame and talk about their ongoing work. In this interview, we talked a bit about their history in the PSP scene, upcoming features in CFW Pro, and their insight on various technical subjects such as the hack of firmware 6.37, or permanent CFW possibilities on unhackable motherboards… sounds interesting? Well, the tasty bits are in the interview, follow me
Read the rest of this entry »
Update: Virtuous Flame and Coldbird’s CFW 6.35 Pro-B has been sent to Beta testers today, and will be publicly released soon, hopefully today. Thanks to epio22 for the tip on this one.
2 days ago, developer coldbird sent a very strong message on his blog regarding the future of 6.35 Pro, a (Light) Custom Firmware developed by himself and Virtuous Flame. In a blog post packed with information, Coldbird announced 2 major points:
You’d rather read Coldbird’s entry by yourselves, but there’s a strong message here that the PSP scene should go back to joining forces, share knowledge, in order to build a strong CFW experience, to make the PSP better even after it will have been long forgotten by Sony and the NGP.
There’s also some bitterness in Coldbird’s post, but overall this sounds to me like a very promising future for our console. Open source CFW? The last time this happened was so long ago most of you probably don’t even know this ever happened. As one of the devs of the first open source Homebrew loader for the PSP, I can only applause this initiative.
Version Pro-B is not there yet, and coldbird’s blog post talks about version C and beyond that…things might change until this happens, but let’s hope for the best, and let me wish luck to the 6.35 Pro team
source coldbird’s blog, thanks to TerryCee for the tip
For those of you who speak French, are learning French, think French sounds cool, or those who think French sounds stupid but funny, you might be interested: I’ll be live on Friday evening (10PM French time, that’s UTC+1), discussing with Mathieulh (PSP/PS3 Dev) in a show hosted by PspGen’s famous webmaster Magixien. Additionally, Wii dev Arasium might join us too.
We will be discussing about the recent events on all gaming devices, hacks, piracy…
It will be 6AM for me here in Japan on Saturday morning, so if you want to hear my voice when I just woke up and I’m completely lacking sleep, this might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you
More info on pspgen’s article
Things are going very fast. For those who are just joining us: until now there were basically two solutions to run homebrews on a PSP. Either you had a hackable PSP on which you could install a “Custom firmware” (CFW), or you owned one of the new models (basically every PSP that was sold since summer 2008), and had to rely on some “exploits” such as the Patapon exploit, which was used to run HBL (a homebrew loader), and later on a HEN (Homebrew Enabler).
CFW or HEN, that was basically the choice we had so far to run homebrews.
Then came fail0verfl0w, and Mathieulh. A group of developers found a critical security issue in the PS3 system, which led to a full analysis of the PS3 firmware, in which some keys used for PSP Game encryption were found. After a few weeks of hard work involving many developers, tools started to emerge. I’ll spare the details for now, but it is basically possible to sign your own games (I’m talking here about games you created, not games you get on the PSN), and run them directly on a PSP without any “classic” hack, or without a Custom Firmware.
Yeah, we're superheroes, you love us
In the video below I’m showing Wagic running on a 6.35 PSP3000. Note that I cold reboot the console, to show that no exploit is running there.
The tools to sign your homebrews, although not entirely user friendly yet, can easily be found with our friend google (and if not now, tomorrow they will be). I used prxEncrypter by bbtgp and fix-relocations by JJS.
These signing techniques still rely on some external data, and Sony could probably fix this in further firmwares by creating a whitelist of allowed Eboots. Will they actually do it, or are they now focusing on the PSP2? For now, this is only user mode (yes, liquidzigong did sign his Hen, but this Hen still relies on a kernel exploit to work, and that’s easy to fix…), which should keep us away from any form of piracy, at least for now (and, alas, from plugin support or CFW as well)
This assumes you have access to your homebrew’s prx. If you only have the EBOOT, you can extract the prx with pbp unpacker (data.psp == your prx)
There are still lots of limitations (no kernel mode, prx should be less than 5MB, no static elf support,…), but tools are being progressively built to make this easier, so I’m sure that as I type this, more convenient tools will already be available. I spotted some tools that allow to sign static elfs by embedding a loader inside of the eboot.
Enjoy
Update 2: Initial tests show that this works with very simple homebrews, but not with more “complex” ones (yes, I tried with Wagic). Just keep in mind how HBL started though 
Update 1 : bbtgp slightly updated his package to make it more user friendly. He says: ” modded build.mak and included sample. Set ENCRYPT=1 in the makefile for other programs to encrypt them”
After the Proof of concept released yesterday by kgsws, developer bbtgp just released a tool that can sign any Homebrew for the PSP.
I haven’t tested it yet, but I’m sure many people will give it a try and see if we can finally run any homebrew on OFW without the use of a Custom Firmware. Unless I misunderstood something, this is user mode only, I don’t expect this to run any kernel application, so forget about iso loaders, or a “signed CFW” for now… which is probably good anyways.
According to bbtgp, this has been tested on a regular “hello world” prx, and worked fine on both a psp1000 and a psp3000.
Download here (previous version here)
source bbtgp on /talk
Developer kgsws (remember the MOHH exploit?) posted on/talk a few hours ago a homebrew that runs on a PSP without “any” hack. This is the results of days of experimenting with the PS3 Firmware, in which keys used for signing PSP applications were discovered by Mathieulh.
Here ‘s a video from psp-hacks.com (yes, I’m lazy)
This is only a proof of concept for now, we can’t be sure if a “sign your own homebrews” tool will be released any time soon, but this is a major breakthrough for the PSP scene, probably as ground-shaking as the Pandora batteries almost 4 years ago…
The homebrew has been confirmed to work on PSPs with Official Firmware, you can download it here to test.
Congrats to all the devs involved in this (I said it already, but I’ve never seen so many devs in one thread)! And please don’t post that “it works” in the programming thread, we will delete posts that are not directly related to development.
Thanks to everyone who sent me the tip, I was on holiday 
Developer neur0n released yesterday what seems to be a 6.35 CFW, which he updated to version “beta 2″ a few hours ago.
I says “seems” because I wasn’t able to test this. According to neur0n this works only on PSP2000 models for now (and I don’t have a PSP 2000), the files don’t ship with any Readme, and my Japanese is broken enough that I’m not entirely sure about the usage. Nevertheless, the sources (mamosuke’s website and Neur0n’s twitter) are trustworthy, so I’m posting this for the people brave enough to give it a try.
Neur0n insists that this is a Beta version, and that you shouldn’t use it if you don’t have a pandora battery handy. This will only work on hackable psp 2000 models. If you have a ta88v3 or any other model (psp1000, psp3000, pspgo), do NOT attempt anything with this. This is a full custom firmware, so if you install this on an unhackable motherboard you will get a permanent brick.
If you’re brave enough to figure out how to install this and test this work in progress on your hackable psp2000, please show us some videos
Download via neur0n’s twitter
source: neur0n via twitter via mamosuke
Update: Davee commented on that and cleared most of the questions everybody had:
coldbird is right, a downgrader “isn’t” possible. He is talking natively, mine hooks into the decryption routines to allow it
That makes sense. Thanks to Matt for the tip.
Original article 01/09: According to Coldbird, one of the developers of Hen PRO 6.35, Sony removed the possibility to run old updaters in firmware 6.35. He stated that it is not possible to downgrade from 6.35.
No you can’t downgrade. In fact this isn’t even a problem with 6.35 PRO, but with Sony.
Sony removed Updater Kernel Module Support for old Kernel Updaters in 6.35, so… once you go 6.35 – you don’t go back.
That’s it basically.
That being said, downgrading is IMO a thing of the past. We used downgraders back in 2006 when Custom firmwares where just a concept. Today tools such as the TN Hen or Hen Pro are closer to a Custom Firmware (I like to call them “Light Custom Firmware”) than actual Homebrew Enablers, as they ship with lots of features that used to be exclusive to Custom Firmwares (recovery menu, plugins support, etc…). So nowadays there’s no real need for people to downgrade unhackable motherboards…
Source Coldbird’s blog (thanks to TerryCee for the tip)
A few days ago, team of developers fail0verfl0w revealed major issues in the security system of the PS3. This was quickly followed by major discoveries in the PS3 code, that seemed to mostly show that Sony was relying way too much on obfuscation for the security scheme of the PS3. One of the consequences of this was also the discovery of some critical information regarding the PSP security.
Independent devs all around the world started releasing their own tools to go further in revealing the PS3 internals.
After being quiet for many days, Sony said in a short statement to technological website Edge:
“We are aware of this, and are currently looking into it. We will fix the issues through network updates, but because this is a security issue, we are not able to provide you with any more details.”
Given the details of the security flaw, which basically gave away the entire signing/encryption mechanism on the PS3, including parts that cannot be updated by a simple software update, the statement by Sony is really surprising. Are they trying to mitigate the buzz around this hack?
Several devs involved in this breakthrough stated that Sony cannot patch this without a hardware upgrade… maybe Sony will soon patent a way to upgrade your PS3 Hardware through network
That being said, it isn’t impossible that Sony revoke some of their keys to play some cat and mouse game with hackers…To me the best move would be something similar to what is done with the XBox: ban people who use a hacked console online. This way hackers can still have fun offline with the hardware they purchased, while normal players still enjoy a good gaming experience online…
Meanwhile, team fail0verfl0w showed a new video of Linux booting on a PS3 (see below), Geohot showed homebrew running on firmware 3.55 (see below), the PSP Eboot signing announced by MathieuLH seems to get closer, and KaKaRoToKS released a MFW for the PS3 (Modified FirmWare)… seems like things are moving really fast on the PS3/PSP development scene.
